Home, business and commercial networks are becoming increasingly diverse and more often involve the interaction of both wireless local area networks (WLAN) and wired networks. A typical infrastructure for a home or business network includes one or more wireless or wired gateways, such as a modem or set-top box, to service one or more client applications or stations. As the client stations and applications in home and business networks become more diverse, the traditional gateway devices are unable to provide interfaces for all of the applications.
The gateway may, for example, be required to provide interfaces to mobile devices, such as laptops and personal digital assistants, and to provide interfaces to stationary devices, such as personal computers and consumer electronics. Each of the various devices and client applications may use different communication standards, protocols, frequencies or technology, such as, for example, wireless networks complying with the 802.11 standards and wired networks using twisted pair, cable or power line communication media. Accordingly, the known gateway devices may not support all of the client applications that a user desires to add to a home or business network.